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A commit message is a description of a change in a Version Control System (VCS). Besides the actual description of the change, it can also serve as an indicator for the purpose of the change, e.g. a change to refactor code might be accompanied by a commit message in the form of "Refactored class XY to improve readability". We would label the change in our example a perfective change, according to maintenance literature. This simplified example shows how it is possible to classify a change by its commit message. However, commit messages are unstructured, textual data and efforts to automatically label changes into categories like perfective have only been applied to a small set of projects within the same company or the same community. In this work, we present a cross-project evaluated and valid mapping of changes to the code base and their purpose that is usable without any customization on any open-source project. We provide further the Eclipse Plug-In Subcat which allows for a comfortable analysis of projects from within Eclipse. By using Subcat, we are able to automatically assess if a commit to the code was e.g. a bug fix or a refactoring. This information is very useful for e.g. developer profiling or locating bad smells in modules.

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Code reviews have many benefits, most importantly to find bugs early in the development phase and to enforce coding standards. Still, it is widely accepted that formal code reviews are time-consuming and the practical applicability in agile development is controversial. This work presents a continuous differential-based method and tool for code reviews. By using a continuous approach to code reviews, the review overhead can be reduced and the effectiveness and applicability in agile environments shall be improved.